Spectacle Alone Does Not Sell Books

Why American Canto stiffed.

I need your help for a little experiment. A few lines down, I’m going to share a poll. I’d like you to answer the poll prior to reading the rest of the post.

Be honest now.

Here we go.

It has become a subject of some fascination that Oliva Nuzzi’s “memoir,” American Canto, sold just a little over 1000 copies in its first week, a middling number weighed against a book that had an excerpt in Vanity Fair and garnered reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The LA Times, Slate, the Washington Post and other high profile outlets.

Usually a book that gathers that level of attention will move considerably more units. Though, looking at the reviews themselves, it is perhaps because of the exposure that the book has sold so poorly.

Judging from the online excerpts shared on social media and at Vanity Fair the book is embarrassingly awful, which makes one wonder how it got published. Not having the results of my own poll ahead of time I’m wondering if I now need to pause and fill in who Oliva Nuzzi is, why she would be able top publish a book to so much media fanfare, and then why this book was always going to be colossal sales flop.

Nuzzi is a (now former) political reporter who was positioned as something of a glamorous wunderkind, blond, beautiful, writing “scoops” that suggested close access to her subjects and something of a unique eye. She rose to prominence during the first Trump campaign and then served as a political writer for New York Magazine from 2017 to 2024 when she was let go for reportedly having an affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during the 2024 campaign.

American Canto is Nuzzi’s side of the affair which she claims was never consummated sexually, but included lots of strange behaviors, including a “poem” RFK Jr. sent to Nuzzi that I’ve recreated here and I suggest reading through parted fingers to mitigate the horror.

Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest 
Drink from me Love.
I mean to squeeze your cheeks 
to force open your mouth. 
I’ll hold your nose as you look up 
at me to encourage you to swallow. 
‘Dont spill a drop’. 
I am a river 
You are my canyon. 
I mean to flow through you. 
I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love.

I suppose here we should fill in another bit of the spectacle which is that we know about RFK Jr.’s “poetry” because Nuzzi’s ex-fiancee, Ryan Lizza, himself a political reporter once deposed from The New Yorker for inappropriate conduct, has been sharing his side of the saga at his newsletter, divulging things Nuzzi does not, including that she’d previously had an affair while covering former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford - he of the Appalachian Trail - during the 2016 election cycle.

Yeesh.

Anyway, Nuzzi is a woman who has been enmeshed in media circles for over a decade, perhaps starting with her previous long term, live-in relationship with Keith Olbermann, which started when Nuzzi was in her teens.

She had an apparent story to tell in an affair (of sorts) with a powerful and famous man, as well as inside access to RFK Jr.’s campaign and the maneuvering to become Secretary of Health and Human Services where he’s been pushing his cause to make measles great again. How could this fail to capture a massive audience of readers?

I shall count the ways.

1. Olivia Nuzzi was not famous, and honestly, probably still isn’t famous

The fact that Nuzzi was incredibly well-connected in media circles does not mean she was famous. She was a magazine writer! I had a vague awareness from my time on Twitter where she was prominent, but this is not fame or even notoriety.

2. Even if you’re famous, your book might not sell.

Back in 2021 in this very newsletter I noted an obvious trend, that fame by itself wasn’t sufficient to sell books, as people far more famous than Olivia Nuzzi - Justin Timberlake, Billie Eilish, Piers Morgan - had disappointing sales for their books.

3. American Canto is poorly written.

At The New Yorker, Molly Fischer calls American Canto “Didion pastiche” which is actually kind because the imitation is so bad it barely rises to the level of pastiche. Reportedly much of American Canto was “written” on Nuzzi’s phone while hiking in the LA-area mountains. I don’t think this was Ms. Didion’s method.

4. American Canto is boring.

This is the verdict of Scaachi Koul at Slate, and I’m going to take her word for it because I’m not reading this thing. It makes sense given that there was no sex and Nuzzi reveals little actual information about RFK Jr. Most of the shocking revelations have come via Lizza’s newsletter posts as he offers a kind of spurned fiancee commentary track to the whole ordeal. Reviews suggest that the book lacks any self-reflection as Nuzzi tries to paint herself as a glamorous fool, emphasis on the glamour.

Poorly written books by non-famous people may stand a chance if there is material contained of sufficient interest to curious audiences, but you can’t be both bad and uninteresting.

5. The whole story is sad, not salacious.

The book itself and the additional revelations about Nuzzi paint her not as an interesting, if tragic, figure, but something less interesting, a woman without a stable sense of self who lurches between toxic men seeking god know’s what to fill the hole in her spirit. The bit of news that perhaps most broke me was that a teenage Nuzzi (under the stage name “Livvy”) once pursued pop stardom, releasing a single titled “Jailbait.” Audiences can be attracted to train wrecks, but this kind of desperation for approval through attention/fame has never worn well. This kind of Real Housewives-style attention is real, but limited currency in the culture, and again, we’re talking about books, not trying to make a clip go viral on TikTok.

By all accounts American Canto is bad at the thing it’s supposed be, a book that people who buy and read books might want to read. There has been some pushback that 1000+ copies sold at release is not a bad number in today’s publishing atmosphere, but this is not true for a book that has received this much media coverage. Yes, I have been psyched at the handful of weeks during my career when one of my books sold 1000 copies, but no one is making six (or seven) figure bets on my books. This is an utter tanking.

There has also been some pushback among Nuzzi’s media industry friends that the criticism is sexist or even “slut-shaming” and that Nuzzi wasn’t doing anything that other hard driving political access journalists haven’t done before her. Sometimes we get too close to the sun and the wax on our wings melts, and all that jazz.

Except that if what Lizza has written is true (and there’s been no public dispute), Nuzzi was running active interference for RFK Jr. through catch and kill operations, even as she knew he was using drugs (despite claims to decades of sobriety), and was engaging in all manner of other disqualifying behaviors. This is a guy who is literally leading to increased death and disease on a scale that is impossible to imagine. Nuzzi is supposedly a journalist. If she had shared even a fraction of what she’d been privy to, RFK Jr. may never have ascended to a position where he could be such a menace.

Nuzzi is no girl-bossing hero. She’s an ethically and morally compromised mess that does not deserve our admiration or respect. This exchange from her podcast interview with the Bulwark’s Tim Miller shows a lack of introspection that suggests a person who simply is not in a position to write coherently about what she witnessed and what she did. Maybe someday, but not now. She is a human being and deserves our sympathy over the obvious distress she finds herself in over this stuff, and there should be a way back for her in the future, but this is the same person who was doing glamour shots in the New York Times six weeks ago. She obviously knew and hoped for some measure of controversy and spectacle (sales!), but did not anticipate that all of this would blow back on her.¹

The cynicism that led Nuzzi’s publisher (Simon & Schuster) to solicit and publish this book seems boundless, and ultimately a lousy way to run a publishing company. Sure, every publisher wants big, splashy best sellers and having a wedge to drive initial attention in the hopes that this spreads to greater awareness is useful, but books are not Labubu. Books do not disseminate like memes.

Pardon me for saying the obvious, but for a book to sell, it must please readers in some tangible way that induces those readers to tell others that this is a book they should read. Yes, a lot of media attention out of the gate makes the potential for achieving this more likely, but without the latter part of the equation, the book will not sell.

Given the almost universal disdain for American Canto, it’s inconceivable that people working at the publisher couldn’t anticipate this, but they went for it anyway. Maybe it was the sunk cost fallacy, some chunk of money already being promised and hoping against hope that it would catch on, but presumably there was at least a portion of the manuscript available before the deal was struck. People with judgment this poor about the quality of books should not work in publishing.

At some point, a book is going to be read. If that experience doesn’t hold up, you shouldn’t put the book into the world. It really isn’t any more complicated than that.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I share my nonfiction selections for my annual Biblioracle Book Awards.

At Inside Higher Ed I wrote about how I’ve seen lots of evidence that students want something more than an AI-mediated future.

The Chicago Review of Books announced its annual “CHIRBY Awards.”

The New York Times is ON IT with their story on how “kids rarely read whole books anymore, even in English class” but longtime readers of The Biblioracle Recommends know that I’ve been on this case for years. The post below is Sept. of 2021, but I include this thinking in Why They Can’t Write, written in 2017-2018.

And of course my friends at McSweeney's are on the Olivia Nuzzi story with a collective effort from Wendy Aarons, Miriam Jayaranta, and Emily Flake, “More Excerpts of Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto.”

Recommendations

1. More Than Words by John Warner
2. Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
3. Historical Atlas of the Pacific Northwest by Derrek Hayes
4. The Last Wilderness by Murray Morgan
5. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Eladia M. - Lynnwood WA.

This is one of those cases where a book just appeared in my head, almost instantaneously after perusing the list. Couldn’t tell you exactly why, but I’ve learned to trust the Biblioracling vibes: Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz.

It feels strange to have the year be winding down. I see a list of six different ideas I wanted to get to in the newsletter this year all of which except one will likely go begging as I’ll have something for you next week, a week off to go see the families in Chicago, and then a year-end round up to cap us off before we get to 2026.

Thanks always for reading, and if you got this far and haven’t yet, please subscribe.

JW
The Biblioracle

1. RFK Jr. and Lizza (and Olbermann, who willingly jumped into the fray) deserve and are receiving criticism as well, but we’re talking about Nuzzi’s book, the thing that was within her power.